Highly exciting orchestral works in the Copland-Bernstein-Piston mold.

Walter Simmons writing in the July-August 1997 Fanfare reviewing a new Delos recording of Mennin's music conducted by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra said, "less than a week before this writing, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of their ambitious and talented young conductor David Alan Miller, performed and recorded a group of Mennin worksHaving just heard the Albany Symphony's performance of this work (Moby Dick), I anticipate that that recording will be far more satisfactory." For America's great serious music to be enjoyed and understood by audiences it must be communicated to them with energy, excitement, and exuberance by the conductor. David Alan Miller does this in the music heard on this disc. The highlight of this recording is the Symphony No. 6.

Review:

"As president of the Juilliard School, Peter Mennin was a smooth, dapper businessman, but he was a rugged individualist as a composer. He wrote potent, energetic works in an idiom that took off from the tonal, Neoclassical style of Walter Piston and evolved into ever-more-dissonant, dense music of almost demonic intensity.The masterful Sixth Symphony (1953) brings greater levels of both lyricism and dissonance, ratcheting up the emotional temperature. These four works make for an exhilarating, almost exhausting program.This disc is enthusiastically recommended." (Fanfare)